Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 Best Practices Manual page 6

The 2000 family is the only midrange storage product with symmetric active-active front-end and dynamic
back-end controller architecture that provides integrated, automated hardware-based front-to-back-end I/O load
balancing. This ensures I/O traffic to back-end disk devices is dynamically managed, balanced and shared
equally across both controllers, even if the I/O load to specific logical units (LUs) is skewed. Storage
administrators are no longer required to manually define specific affinities between LUs and controllers,
simplifying overall administration. The 2000 family's architecture takes full advantage of native OS multipathing
capabilities, thereby eliminating mandatory requirements to implement proprietary multipathing software.
No other midrange storage product has an advanced serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drive interface. The new
point-to-point back-end design virtually eliminates I/O transfer delays and contention associated with Fibre
Channel arbitration. It also provides significantly higher bandwidth and I/O concurrency and isolates any
component failures that might occur on back-end I/O paths.
Flexibility
• Choice of Fibre Channel and iSCSI server interfaces or both
• Resilient performance using LUs that can be configured to span multiple drive trays and back-end paths
• Choice of high-performance SAS and low-cost SATA disk drives
• Lowered costs using SAS or SATA drives that can be intermixed in the same tray
• Support for all major open systems operating systems, host bus adapters (HBAs) and switch models from
major vendors
Scalability
• Ability to add capacity, connectivity and performance as needed
• Concurrent support of large heterogeneous open systems environments using up to 2048 virtual ports with
host storage domains and 4096 LUs
• Ability to scale capacity to 472TB
• Ability to scale performance to more than 900K IOPS
Seamless expansion due to data-in-place upgrades from Adaptable Modular Storage 2100 to Adaptable
•
Modular Storage 2300 and to Adaptable Modular Storage 2500
Large-scale disaster recovery and data migration using integration with Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V
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and Hitachi Universal Storage Platform VM
• Complete lifecycle management solutions within tiered storage environments
Availability
• Outstanding performance and non-disruptive operations using Hitachi Dynamic Load Balancing Controller
• 99.999% data availability
• No single point of failure
• Hot swappable major components
• Dual-battery backup for cache
• Non-disruptive microcode updates
• Flexible drive sparing with no copy back required after a RAID rebuild
• Host multipathing capability
• In-system SQL Server and Exchange backup and snapshot support through Windows Volume Shadow Copy
Service
• Remote site replication
• RAID-5, RAID-1, RAID-1+0 and RAID-0 (SAS drives) support
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